Talk:Main Page/redesign

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Redesign discussion

This page had gotten a bit confusing, so I archived the old content at Talk:Main Page/redesign/archive of dicussion. I think the redesign is almost ready, but I read through the discussions and we have a few loose ends to tie up.

  1. Any last suggestions for design, color scheme or content on this main page?
  2. What should be included in the video column on the right? OpAphid? NBR? Immant? PaulMark?
  3. Do we need any tweaks to the column on the left, or do we need to start working on some of the pages that the column on the left links to?
  4. What exactly is the purpose of the Featured Article? What sort of articles do we pick and how?

I think once we've answered these questions, we're ready to take it live. We'll want to check in with TWJaniak of course. I'd like to put it up January 3rd. For now, I'd like to jump in on #4, as I think it's an important part of our page. I think the featured article should rotate about once a week. I think that, similar to other wikis, we should use the spot to feature interesting, well-done articles that people might not find otherwise. Some examples that I think could work -- meta-articles about the series like Down The Rabbit Hole that I worked on, the LG15 Soundtrack, really cool fan videos like Deemontreal, an interesting new page like Everything You Need To Play OpAphid when it was first created, or many of the theory pages like Water Theme. Other candidates could be old standbys that get a good reworking -- and of course there will be new pages that haven't been created yet. The other goal of a featured article section is to encourage people to write creative articles knowing that hard work will be prominently showcased.--JayHenry 12:07, 29 December 2006 (CST)

I'm glad you brought these things up. Here's what I'm thinking.
  1. I think we need to play with the next color in the blue header bar. It seems a little too dark to read and it's hard to tell that there's links up there. Other than that, I think it looks great.
  2. I'm not familiar with Immant or Paul Mark, but I do follow NBR and I'm usually just as excited to see a Nikki video as I am to see an official video. For that reason, I'd like to include the more prominant spinoffs such as Nikki Bower, but we would need to determine exactly which spinoffs we need to include and perhaps even make a policy page on it. Of course, I think we should include OpAphid even though not everyone (including myself) follows it. It is an official ARG, afterall.
  3. As for the left column, what I wrote after the dashes needs to be rewritten or tweaked. And the bulleted items might do better in a different order, but I'll leave that up to you guys.
  4. Personally, I'm thinking that rotating the featured article once a week is just right. Not too often, but not to far apart, either. I think we need to develop a page which will list all the previous featured articles, and maybe even a small template to include on the article's page (something like a small box at the bottom of the article that says "This article was featured during the week of January 7th, 2007."). We also need a place for editors to suggest articles. This would be a great way to get the entire core editing community to focus on several articles to get them to a "featured article standard" or something. As for what to include, I think we should definietly NOT include videos, characters, or locations. Other than that, I think JayHenry's suggestions about what to include were great.
--Andy 14:27, 29 December 2006 (CST)
Andy, I think I fixed what you had in mind about the links in the header bar. Let me know if this is what you meant.--JayHenry 17:26, 29 December 2006 (CST)
I also edited back in the "add new video" button, which I think is a useful feature. Lemme know if anyone agrees. Not sure exactly where to put the thing, and I'm heading off for the weekend. Can fix or move it early next week.--JayHenry 17:57, 29 December 2006 (CST)
Both the header and the "add new video" link looks great, in my opinion. --Andy 23:12, 29 December 2006 (CST)
omg, I am in the presence of geniouses!!! Hehehe, lately I haven't been around as much as I would like to be, but I think the new page looks great! I really like JayHenry's suggestions for Featured articles (might I also suggest Tracking device?). The work on vid Template and such is fantastic. I won't be around much for a few more days still, but I hope I'll have a chance to check in every now and then. In the meantime, I just wanted to express my appreciation for the talented team of people that has put this together =) Happy (early) New Year!
OwenIsCool 23:56, 29 December 2006 (CST)
PS Don't feel bad deleting my comment if the page gets cluttered again; no biggie!

In response to Brucker on the archived page, i think that the FA should be one that is substantially better than the others. Cassieiswatching is a pretty good one, as is the page the producers commited. I think they are at least, but i feel that they should be articles that are superior in content and expression of that content. Maybe its not what everyone else likes? Ideas? --Demosthenesdown 00:11, 31 December 2006 (CST)

Demosthenes, I think we all agree with you. We all want good featured articles. On the old page I mentioned that I only picked Breebrows as a joke while I worked on the layout. As for The Story So Far... it's already been featured. And the Cassieiswatching page isn't really good -- it's just long. And besides, Cassie has been over for three months now. Did you read the pages that have been suggested? They're all interesting and well-organized pages. I think they fit what you are asking me for.--JayHenry 16:51, 31 December 2006 (CST)
maybe i should read what other people have to say before i go ahead and keep asking the same questions. i realized it was a joke, i was just using it as an example. thanks so much. --Demosthenesdown 16:12, 1 January 2007 (CST)

This is quite an impressive design. The size seems perfect for a main page; it is uncluttered and has enough info to help a user easily navigate the lgpedia. It still is a wiki-format, yet it has its own distinct lg15 style. I wish I could contribute ideas to this page, but I don't have any. I hope folks put up this new design soon. Ogog 13:47, 31 December 2006 (CST)

Buttons

On the archived talk page we had talked about having some sort of icon for chats, polls, etc. I was thinking it might be nice to have an icon for each blogger too. For example, when a video is posted by Daniel a small "DB" could be used to indent the video. We could use LG, DB, Jtko, G19 (if she's still alive), Op, Tac, and Bro as the initials? I'll try adding the icons tonight to see if it looks good.--JayHenry 15:32, 2 January 2007 (CST)

Hey, that's a good idea! The icons should have different colors, though (lol - sorry, I think about things like this). Pink for Bree, Blue for Daniel, Orange for Jonas, Purple for Gemma, etc. Get what I'm saying? Just to further mark the difference between the characters. Plus, if we used that on the main page we could removed the "Posted by Jonas" that we have on the newest video, which I think looks goofy considering we don't have that for the other videos. --Andy 19:44, 2 January 2007 (CST)
Okay, i started to implement it. But it's getting late here. Need my bed.--JayHenry 01:11, 3 January 2007 (CST)

Final steps (featured article)

I say that as soon as we have a featured article and TWJaniak has signed off, we can take this live. We can continue to tweak, if necessary, on the main page, but I think it's been long enough. Does anyone have any strong preferences for the first featured article? I think the newly redesigned AphidPedia might also make for a good feature to get us started.--JayHenry 14:16, 3 January 2007 (CST)

That would be a good article, but I think we need to have a queue of two or three. --Brucker 14:46, 3 January 2007 (CST)
Previously I'd suggested Down The Rabbit Hole for historical interest. LG15 Soundtrack for its usefulness. Deemontreal for its greatness. A lot of the category:theories and speculation pages are really interesting. Hopefully we'll eventually get some of the religion pages in shape to be featured. That's enough to get us into February. I'm sure more ideas will come up.--JayHenry 15:51, 3 January 2007 (CST)

New Boxes Around Videos

I've noticed the newly added dashed boxes around the videos under the "Latest Developments" area. However, these aren't going to work. On my computer (at least), the boxes refuse to take up more than one line. So instead of wrapping and going to the next line, it instead forces the page to become much, much wider. For instance, in order to read the entire sentence, I have to scroll my browser to the right. If you don't understand what I'm talking about (if it shows up differently on your computer) - I can screenshot it for you. Regardless, I think we need to remove these boxes. --Andy 14:26, 3 January 2007 (CST)

LOL, that's not a design choice, that's just a malfunctioning template I haven't fixed yet. Sorry.--JayHenry 14:35, 3 January 2007 (CST)
Dude, you have to take the spaces out completely! --Brucker 14:48, 3 January 2007 (CST)
Alright, I fixed it. For some reason the <noinclude> tag was screwing it up. I'll just put the usage note on the talk page.--JayHenry 14:50, 3 January 2007 (CST)
Wow, thanks Brucker. Which spaces were causing the problems?--JayHenry 14:52, 3 January 2007 (CST)
You just have to be careful with linebreaks before the <noinclude> tag. --Brucker 14:52, 3 January 2007 (CST)
Geez, good catch. I need to be more careful with these templates! I would have cried if you hadn't saved that.--JayHenry 14:56, 3 January 2007 (CST)
Ugh, I've had an awful time with templates. You may have noticed yesterday I was trying to change the main video template and eventually just gave up. --Brucker 15:03, 3 January 2007 (CST)

last minute objections?

Barring any objections I think this redesign has carried on long enough -- a little over three weeks. I'll start transferring this over to the Main Page in the next couple hours if nobody offers a reason otherwise. I checked with TWJaniak via e-mail and he said he likes what we've come up with. Dearly Beloved, if anyone has any reason this page should not become the Main Page, speak now or forever hold your peace.--JayHenry 13:30, 4 January 2007 (CST)

Here's a later-than last minute objection: Should we have some sort of visual cue to separate the OpAphid series videos from the LG15s?--Brucker 18:33, 4 January 2007 (CST)
It's a good idea. Other than the ability to display different initials, the templates don't make any sort of visual distinction. Do you have any ideas how to make them look different?--JayHenry 18:58, 4 January 2007 (CST)
I don't know how to do it, but this is a cool idea if someone else knows: You know how [ Op Aphid ] puts the name in brackets like that? What if we could put OpAphid videos in brackets? I think I know how it could be done in html, but not wiki markup. I'll look into it and experiment. --Brucker 10:24, 5 January 2007 (CST)
There, that gives at least an idea as to what I'm talking about. It needs some tweaking, but you get the idea. Most likely, there needs to be a template called something like "OpVid" that incorporates the bracket style. --Brucker 10:55, 5 January 2007 (CST)
I've been tweaking Template:OpVid quite a bit, and can't quite get it exactly the way I want, but I think this might do. I took out the "description", as many OpAphid videos have really long descriptions. Incorporate on the main page, reject, or tweak as you see fit, I'm going home. --Brucker 19:49, 5 January 2007 (CST)

Hello

I'm new here, just wanted to say hello and introduce myself.